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> It can't be modeled well as a for-profit company

I'm not an MBA, but why the hell not? They entice people to become regular users with all the free stuff, building a network, allowing them to make an enormous profit off of the few products they do sell.

If they started charging for other things besides job ads (and the other 1 or 2 things they charge for), they could very well start losing money because of people refusing to pay and going elsewhere.

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Here, "Money left on the table" doesn't mean "short-term money that would have long term negative consequences for the business". I means free money, that is money after you take into account the effects of various price changes. You may disagree and claim that CL's strategy of charging for nothing besides a few NY/LA business listings is for-profit optimal--and therefore that there's really no free money--but you'd be in a minority.

I do in fact argue that CL's strategy is profit-optimizing as a market-making and competition-avoiding strategy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324889

Ah, I forgot that the paid listings were only for certain locations, not just certain categories.

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